The Poetry of John Keats: A Celebration of Beauty, Classicism, and Romantic Richness
Being an avid lover of poetry, to be more specific romantic poetry, I have always been fascinated by the sense of unity I feel with the world of poets. Romantic poetry, for some of its main attributes such as pictorial quality, images, mysticism, absorption in the beauty and life of nature, classical characteristics and, above all, the celebration of beauty and aestheticism, it has great appeal for the most refined. and sophisticated readers of all time. And amazingly, it is this painterly quality, the sensual delight of nature, the sheer artistic beauty and richness of imagery displayed by the romantic poets that continues to inspire us in some way, even after so many years!
When we think of the Romantic poets, the name of John Keats, the most beautiful flower of the Romantic movement, comes to mind the most. Deeply revered as one of the greatest word-painters in English poetry, his verse presents subtle imagery and a fusion of different sensations that, time and time again, have produced musical effects, and in that he was rather a self-conscious artist. .
Keats’ age and literary influence on Keats:
The romantic era, as history says, was the time when almost all of Europe was intensely shaken by the ideas and ideologies of the French Revolution. The leading poets of that period drew much inspiration from the personal and political freedom of the revolution, breaking the leaps of eighteenth-century artistic conventions. These were the days when these ideas and ideals “aroused the youthful passion of Wordsworth, of Coleridge,” “stirred the anger of Scott,” and “worked like leaven in Byron”… Keats, however, distinguished himself from his poets and contemporary writers. he figures in the fact that the emotion and turmoil that gathered around the revolution were not directly represented in his poetry. That said, it’s worth mentioning that parts of ‘Hyperion,’ ‘Fall of Hyperion,’ and ‘Endymion’ bear witness to the fact that Keats was influenced by political turmoil, but it’s definitely not as pronounced as Wordsworth’s works, Coleridge or Shelley. His poetry, on the other hand, was an embodiment of his vision of the beauty that he sees everywhere in nature, in art, in acts of human chivalry, and in the fascinating tales of ancient Greece. In fact, this was Keats’ deepest and most intimate experience of the soul, which he expresses most emphatically in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:
“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”, that’s all/ You know on earth, and all you need to know.
Following his poetic growth, researchers have discovered that he was educated almost exclusively by English poets. While in the early part of his career the influence of Edmund Spenser, especially his ‘Faerie Queene’, was instrumental in sparking his imaginative genius; the melancholy love of sensuous beauty, the exuberance of fantasy, and the response to the allure of nature characteristic of Spenser’s poems would find an echo in Keats’s poems. In recent years, critics have cited the influence of Shakespeare, Milton, and even Wordsworth on his poems. While Shakespeare’s influx of words, allusions to him find expression in the 1817 volume of his ‘Endymion’, he too was greatly influenced by the distinctive spirit and vocabulary of Old English poets, especially those of the Renaissance. That said, it’s worth mentioning that the influence of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is very visible in his ‘Hyperion’. At the same time, the classical influence on his poetry has also been the subject of intense investigation by scholars.
Critics today say that what makes Keats’s poetry the most distinguished of all the Romantic poets is the fact that his poetic genius blossomed in the romantic breeze and matured in the sunlight of classicism. The genuine classicism of ancient Greece, displaying characteristic classical restraint, is very much present in his poems. What’s more, it melds harmoniously with the romantic ardor of his poetry, resulting in a wonderful fusion of romantic drive and classical severity. This statement holds much truth when we consider his older Odes, where we note Keats’s sense of form, purity, and order. His Odes have all the spontaneity and freedom of imagination that characterize the poetry of the Romantic era. For example, when in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the poet describes the song of the bird as the voice of eternity and expresses an intense longing to die in the hope of merging with eternity, there is this romantic suggestion of the sensual delight of the poet in these lines:
“The same that has many times / Enchanted magic cases, opening on the foam / Of dangerous seas, in abandoned fairy lands.”
However, immediately, the poet is contained with the verses:
“Desperate! The very word is like a bell / To call from you to myself”… which is a perfect example of romantic passion fused with classical restraint. In all his mature odes, including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ and ‘Ode to Psyche’, he is said to have set aside his overloaded diction of his early poems and they emerge with a romantic richness that is replete with the Hellenic clarity that characterizes Greek literature.
Poetic alienation and the theme of melancholy:
While beauty and mutability are said to be the recurring themes in Keats’s mature Odes, critics have noted that he was somewhat “obsessed with the close juxtaposition of joy and pain, delight and pain”. Some point out that in his pursuit of beauty, he became an escapist, ignoring the realities of life. In his first poems, ‘Isabella’, ‘Lamia’, La eve de Santa Inés’ and others, his imagination certainly plays with the romance of love, with medieval elements, cruel and mysterious ladies, ‘a fairy girl’, the spell and enchantment of the magical world. However, all of this is characterized by a sense of alienation from him as a creative thinker, which takes on a deeper tone and meaning in his later works, that is, in his Odes. Throughout his career as a poet, he strove to harmonize what scholars today call ‘the life of sensation with the life of thought’. His earlier longing for the thoughtless enjoyment of sensual pleasures, as seen in his ‘Dream and Poetry’, is later replaced by a strong longing to persistently and resolutely submit to the joy and beauty of life, which is accompanied by the inevitable pain. hopelessness and despair of life. Therefore, the lines:
“Joy whose hand is always on her lips/Saying goodbye.” Keats knew that joy and beauty on this earth are transient, and from that transience comes the melancholy so characteristic of his poems. Melancholy, he says, “dwells with beauty / Beauty that must die.”
It is this triumph of Stoic acceptance of life over despair that he achieves through deep spiritual experience, as he expresses in his ‘Ode on a Greek Urn’, “When old age destroys this generation / You will stand in the midst Of another affliction than ours…
These lines can never leave an escapist’s pen. For me, he was purely a thinker deeply concerned with the mystery of life that he deals with as a poet, not as a political rebel or a philosopher. Scholastic investigations strive to draw new insights into poetry from him even today. As a reader, I would be content to explore the romantic fervor and richness of imagery in his poems for years to come.
Some useful resources that helped me write this article:
Muir, Kenneth (ed): John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool 1957)
Ridley, M.R.: The Craft of John Keats
GM Bowra: The Romantic Imagination
Middleton Murry: Studies at Keats
Dr. S. Sen: John Keats: Selected Poems with Odes, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion